Transylvania was not the only oasis of religious tolerance in Eastern Europe. In the 1570s, the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania became another safe haven for religious dissenters and freethinkers—or, in the view of one Polish cardinal, “a place of shelter for heretics.”126 Poland-Lithuania was an elective monarchy, where the king was appointed by the nobility. When Sigismund II Augustus died childless in 1572, the noblemen had to import a member of another European dynasty and settled on Henry Valois, the younger brother of the French king. To prevent the sectarian bloodshed that had
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